Little golden stickers, shiny and holographic, a real candy for the eye.

They carry a message:

The consultant that provided this drawing is a CMBC (Certified Model Based
(AEC) Consultant) and all the information within the marked drawing is
guaranteed to be based on a 3D digital-model.
"Read More

She suggests a certification that guarantees the drawing is based on a 3D digital model.

Brilliant idea, isn't it?

Well, speak with BIM Service Providers or Contractors and hear their pain about this issue.

We see many projects which the designer claims that he used BIM and provides a model. But instead of this helping us, it makes things worse because the documentation has been separated from the model many months ago and they do not have much in common any more.

So, I support Zolna's idea totally and I hope it will be heard by vendors.

We were discussing using Vico in one of our client's project recently but all of a sudden I noticed that they are interested in creating a pretty animation showing how columns, slabs are built etc only, nothing more.

If you are looking for a solution to help you optimize your schedule...

or

If you are trying to impress your client by finishing the project 6 months earlier rather than showing him animations just to show off...

Then the solution I would recommend it is VICO!

Because VICO understands location based quantities drives the schedule. So 5D comes before 4D and makes a lot of sense! At the end of the day changing durations without an affect on resources does not make much sense, right?

Here comes a short video about it:

There is a very nice discussion started by Holly on LinkedIn about this actually. You might want to have a close look;)

"I recently spent a long weekend with my two-and-a-half year old nephew. I
was told that when he gets fidgety to ask him to sing the A-B-C’s and
practice counting one to ten.

I wasn’t too concerned when letters of the alphabet started
disappearing. But for the life of me, I couldn’t get him to include a 4
in his counting. I tried using his flashcards; I tried lining up his
stuffed animals for the roll call; but 4 was mysteriously absent.

We have a similar situation at Vico. When everyone learned to count 3D,
4D, 5D BIM, we went and changed the order. We count 3D, 5D, 4D.

Quantities drive the schedule and the estimate, but with Vico Office,
the estimator takes the lead in the workflow. Here’s how it works:

With Vico Office Takeoff Manager, we automatically examine the model
geometry to generate construction-caliber quantities. Now with the
quantities, estimators use Vico Office Cost Planner to create multiple
iterations of the 5D estimate as the models’ level of detail increases. "

Once a friend of mine told me that he was flying with Azerbaijan Airways. Announcements were quite easy for him to understand so he felt very comfortable.

Towards the end of the flight an announcement gave him almost a heart attack!

"We will start crashing within 10 minutes!"

What would you do if you hear such an announcement! Well, he was about to freak out but he noticed that everybody else is calm.

Himm, something is strange here!!!

The gentlemen next to him noticed his white face and start laughing.

Here you go: The word they use in Azeri Dialect for landing means crashing in our dialect:)))

Why am I telling you this story?

Lately almost everyone heard about BIM and many claims they understand it. But the problem is understanding of BIM changes from person to person. Even the terminology!

We are spending a lot of time making our statements as clear as possible to our clients but it is very hard to avoid confusions.

As a solution, I am recommending our clients to have a look at Penn State's BIM websites. The main BIM Uses are defined in a very clear way and it is usually very helpful to the BIM beginners:)http://bim.psu.edu/Uses/

Tuesday, May 15, 2012

I know the title sounds strange for the ones new to our blog but we have been working on this training guide for a while since we saw a severe need.

In one of the previous posts, I told you how an innocent small mistake of IT team cost us and the BIM team 1 day. This one day is equal to 5 man/day unfortunately since it affected 4 computers. If you want to refresh your memory you can read it the BIM for IT Team post.

"BIM Training for IT Team" covers:

License Management

BIM Server

BIM Server Remote Connection

BIM Server Backup & Restore Examples

At the end of each section basic troubleshooting steps are also included.

Don't worry we wrote it in a language that IT team can understand. For instance we inform them about the consequences of deleting OS user as well as how to fix it.

Jothi spend quite long time on it and I would like to thank him for his good work:)

Saturday, May 12, 2012

I am sorry for the last week. I was extremely busy and did not have much chance to write to the blog.

Thanks to being so busy last week, I have a lot to tell you:))

I had a strange meeting last week! I call it strange because it was the first meeting I had without a "Top Manager".

We only had the "Junior - Young Engineers" and "Senior Engineers".

They were all very nice and kind. this was the common thing amongst them. But after the first 30 minutes of the meeting they were divided into 2 poles like North and South.

Young ones were extremely impressed with BIM and willing to learn more.

But the senior ones were totally against it.

Yes, this is not something new for me but since during all my recent meetings the Top Managers were also available, I have not seen the segmentation of opinions in relation with ages so obviously for a long time. (I hope I won't be like that in the future:))

Normally Top Managers are interested in a new technology because it develops their business and the headache of the implementation doe not affect them directly.

Well, this meeting reminded me the famous Technology Adoption Process graph in Geoffrey Moore's book Crossing the Chasm.

You will see this graph in all internal presentations of technology companies.

But I feel like it needs a new make up so I added some more information on it depending on my experiences:))

For instance, the graph says "Innovators"! Who are the innovators in the construction business. These are the "Rock Star" architects and engineers who are always ahead of everyone whatever the cost is. When I was still a student, all the "wow" architectural offices were ArchiCAD users in Ankara and I also did my summer practice at one those offices. Believe me the chief architect in the office was a real rock star. He was even designing his own clothes, playing drums at the age of 60 etc.

What about "Early Adopters"? These are the employees of the companies which has forward looking Business Development Managers or CEOs. They always research how can they keep their company as a market leader or how can they be the market leader and when they find the tool, they implement it with 100% commitment. AIDEA, from Philippines is an great example for this. They implemented ArchiCAD BIM 7 years ago and they grew from a 20 men company to TOP 86 in the world. Here comes an interview with Aidea's CEO, Abelardo Tolentino.

Another example is Adnan Saffarini Consultancy! They were the market
leader in the UAE and wanted to keep it. Hassan Saffarini, Operations
Director, saw the 2009 recession as an opportunity to develop their
company and start implementing ArchiCAD BIM. Hassan Saffarini's interview"

Early Majority! From here onwards it's not only companies who adopts but also the individuals who starts getting involved. Early majority is the "Hardworking Young Professionals" who are very competitive and wants to be the best in their profession. They want to learn anything which helps them to achieve their aim. We usually try to select the BIM Teams in the large companies from these people.

Late Majority! Off! These are the lazy ones which is almost impossible for me to understand. Unfortunately they do not notice how big is the opportunity they are missing! They are usually content the way they are and do not change unless they are forced to.

Laggards! These are the Senior Professionals! We can call them "Rebels" as well:)) They usually feel threaten with the new technology because they think their skills will be no longer valuable and the young ones will perform better than them. So they start sabotaging the meetings or implementations:)) Yes, but there is no reason for them to feel threaten. First of all, it's their experience what makes them so valuable not their skills with the tools they use. Secondly, if they want they perform as good as the young ones.

In one of our recent implementations, we assigned the most senior engineer as the BIM Manager since he ended up learning the process much better than the rest of the team. Although he was at least 15 years older then them.

Ohh!!! It became such a long post! Time to stop and say see you tomorrow:))

The presentation was quite interesting in general but what stroke me most was the way they used BIM to check the sun angle and how it effects the driver when they were designing a race circuit.

They purely used the features of their BIM software, no extra plug-ins or nothing custom developed.

Then I noticed there were many other things they found solutions with some workarounds within the same BIM Software. OK! These workarounds are sometimes cumbersome but still much faster than waiting the software vendor to develop it:)

As you see, it is not the software what brings success, it is the PEOPLE!

Monday, May 7, 2012

Architects no longer have excuse to design non-sustainable buildings!!!

EcoDesigner comes out of the box with ArchiCAD 16.

Yes, performing energy evaluation of your design is no more a luxury. Even a junior architect can understand how EcoDesigner works and perform Energy Evaluations.

If you are still not very confident about using EcoDesigner, Graphisoft created an excellent Playlist where every and each function of EcoDesigner is explained in detail. Here you go:
http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLA200C89E9E1D1280&feature=plcp

I think integrated Building Energy Information Modeling is the most important benefit that ArchiCAD 16 brings to us and deserves 5 BIG Stars:))

Sunday, May 6, 2012

When I first started working as an ArchiCAD trainer, I decided to download GDL objects from internet and make a library DVD for our clients. It was my mission for 2 weeks in the office. Whenever I was free I was working on my little project.

What was the result?

Well, I downloaded 3-4 thousand objects and made a DVD that we were giving the the clients with the purchase of ArchiCAD. (It costed me red eyes during these two weeks though)

A year after we started delivering this DVD, I went to the software "bazaar" where they sell pirated copies to check how is the demand for ArchiCAD etc:))))

I asked the price of ArchiCAD. It was 20 Lira.

Then I asked the price of AutoCAD. It was 10 Lira.

I asked why this ArchiCAD is so expensive and the reply was hilarious. They said because it comes with an extensive extra library.

Yes, you are right!

They were even pirating my library to add value to their business:)))

That was the day I understood how important content is!

Now, Graphisoft released BIMcomponents.com and you no longer need a poor little new graduate to stay in front of the computer and download objects, categorize them etc.

Just go to your Object Settings, search for what you want and you can directly download it into your project. I believe the amount of content will be a lot more than before since it is so easy to upload objects now. It is directly from ArchiCAD. I think it is very cool.

The objects will be free. This is another great advantage.

Though I would like to have paid objects in the long run. It can be like iTunes inside ArchiCAD. You make your search and you can filter as per the pricing.

Am I crazy? Why do I want paid objects?

I see a business opportunity here:)))

Airport and hospital projects! They require quite complex equipment to be modeled and the users are ready to pay but they can not find any proper content. So here I see a big opportunity for ArchiCAD experts. They can work with manufacturers, model their content and sell through BIMcomponents.com. Graphisoft can get their share on them as Apple does. Here Graphisoft's role is important. They have to make sure that the paid objects are "quality" objects.

We went through a lot of headache with hospital equipment in Najaf Hospital Implementation. Curious ones can read it from here.

Please do not say "What is so special about Morph Tool's push-pull surface feature? We already had it in SketchUp?" !

Yes, you had it in SkecthUp but it was a dummy model. It was lacking the "I" in B(I)M.

However in ArchiCAD it is an integrated part of the Building Information Model, a native element.

You can get it's volume, area information or add further data that you might be using for conceptual planning.

I think this features deserves a 5 STAR!

Have a great day and nice weekend!

PS: I received an email from a Turkish architect who was not sure if I am Turkish or not. Let me clarify the confusion created by my strange name. I am 100% Turkish, born in Turkey, grow up in Turkey, studied in Turkey. Basically "Made in Turkey".

Yes, my name is not Turkish since my mother has Circasssian (Cerkez) origins.

Yes, I do speak Turkish very well! Feel free to email me in Turkish:))

One more thing I could not stop myself from mentioning. We do not have any problems with Greeks on the contrary to the general belief:)) They actually have very nice islands:))